The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the societyβs values, can force it to change.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fiction immerses us in experiences akin to memories rather than real events.
In this quote, Samuel R. Delany emphasizes that while reading fiction can deeply engage us and evoke strong emotions, the experiences we gain from it are not the same as those derived from real-life occurrences. Instead, they resemble memories, highlighting the unique way that stories shape our thoughts and feelings through imaginative engagement rather than direct experience.
Themes
FictionMemoryExperienceReadingStories
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about the impact of literature.
More from Samuel R. Delany
All quotes βHow we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
Similar quotes
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
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The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
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A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.
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Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
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A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.
Northrop FryeRead
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
Ralph EllisonRead